Imran Ghory wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>That depends on exactly what you mean by
"consensus".
Try [[Consensus]].
I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I haven't yet reached the point
where I trust Wikipedia over a good dictionary to accurately describe
the precise meanings of words. But there is still nice info in that article.
>There actually might be a US/UK English distinction
here.
>The OED says that consensus requires unanimity,
You're misreading the OED, it states unanimity of a
number of
persons, not however of everyone involved.
That's a good point, although I don't think that it's very clear either way.
Well in any case, with Webster's (1913) offering a quotation
that becomes quite implausible if consensus requires unanimity,
with Wikipedia explicitly stating that there is no such requirement,
and with the OED now proved at worst a little wishy washy,
clearly a single person cannot (necessarily) veto a consensus decision.
Although Anthere seemed to regard such veto power as a *good* thing,
its lack should make the vote supporters happier about consensus.
(Not that we couldn't invent a thing-like-consensus-except-that-it-
-doesn't-have-to-be-unanimous if the dictionaries had gone the other way,
but it's nice to know that people have discussed your idea beforehand,
to the point of giving it a name. It's not such an unknown forbidding
new territory ^_^.)
-- Toby